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On June 6th Columbia University celebrated the opening of the new state-of-the-art building that is to be the home of their School of Nursing. The seven-story, 68,000 square foot facility is designed to give students an ultramodern learning experience that will prepare them for work as clinicians, researchers, and educators. This building was funded in part by the University's $25M capitol campaign.

Columbia University Medical Center’s new, state-of-the-art medical and graduate education building was completed in time to open for the fall term. Construction of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center began in September of 2013. The building was designed to reshape the look and feel of the Medical Center campus and to create spaces that facilitate the development of skills essential for modern medical practice. This 100,000-square-foot, glass, concrete and steel center’s most distinguishing feather is a network of social and study spaces distributed along an exposed, interconnected vertical staircase, known as the “Study Cascade” which extends the height of the 14 story building.

Researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) may have found a way to reduce brain damage caused by a stroke or stroke-like event. In a study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, 10-day-old mice that had an hypoxic (lack of oxygen) or ischemic (lack of blood) brain injury were treated with a fat emulsion containing either DHA or EPA—omega-3 fatty acids. The researchers evaluated the mice’s neurological function 24 hours and 8 to 9 weeks after the brain injury. They discovered that the mice treated with the DHA omega-3 fatty acids had a significant reduction in brain injury. This did not hold true for those treated with EPA-omega 3. The DHA group also had significantly better results in multiple brain functions during the 8 and 9 weeks evaluation compared to the EPA-treated mice and the control group which went untreated.

New York's Columbia University is nearing the completion of an ambitious building project more than three years in the making. Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) will open its new state-of-the-art building this August. Work began on this 100,000 square-foot, fourteen-story glass tower in September of 2013 thanks in large part due to a financial gift from Dr. Roy Vagelos and his wife Diana. So it seems fitting that the building will be named the Vagelos Education Center.

Neuroscientists at Rockefeller University in New York will be making breakthroughs in a brand new institute, according to a recent announcement from the university and the Kavli Foundation. The new Kavli Neural Systems Institute (Kavli NSI) will be located at Rockefeller University, thanks in part to a $20 million endowment supported equally by Kavli and Rockefeller.

Researchers at Columbia University recently conducted a study aiming to identify an Alzheimer’s gene in African-Americans. The results were published in the April 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association,and the study was funded by NIH research grants. African-Americans with the ABCA7 gene have almost twice the amount of risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. According to a Columbia University news article, the gene is involved in producing cholesterol and lipids, and researchers believe that lipid metabolism may be a key pathway in Alzheimer’s disease in African-Americans, more so than it may be in white people.

A $20 million gift from Philip and Cheryl Milstein to the Columbia University Medical Center was announced recently. The donation will be used as part of an effort to rejuvenate the medical campus with construction of the Medical & Graduate Education Building on Haven Street between West 171st and West 172nd Streets. Administrators at Columbia University Medical Center said the building will include “innovative classroom and study spaces that will incorporate state-of-the-art information technology while facilitating collaborative, team-based learning.” The new building’s function will be the training of students in the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the biomedical science departments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (Read our earlier blog on this new construction project at CUMC here.)

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center cell engineering researchers and their clinician colleagues have been in the news recently for a successful experimental cell therapy. Called targeted immunotherapy, a patient's T cells are genetically altered in the lab, then reintroduced with the directive to target and kill cancer cells. The treatment was carried out on a group of adults who all suffered from a rapidly progressing form of leukemia that had not responded to chemotherapy. All five went into remission after the novel cell treatment, and three have stayed that way for a number of months. Results of the ongoing clinical trial appeared in the March 20 online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine, along with an article in the New York Times.

Dr. Thomas Jessell is a developmental neurobiologist at Columbia University Medical Center and the latest recipient of the Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, which includes a $100,000 award. In the Jessell Lab in the Hammer Health Sciences Building, researchers study the vertebrate central nervous system to understand how neurons become encoded at the embryonic level, particularly in the spinal cord. The Scolnick Prize singles out Jessell's work for identifying signaling molecules and transcriptional code that establish a linkage between functional circuitry and motor behavior. Also a member of Columbia's Motor Neuron Center, which is dedicated to the study of motor neuron diseases like ALS, Dr. Jessell is a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and part of the larger Columbia Neuroscience interdisciplinary research community. He will travel to Boston in April to accept the prize and deliver a lecture (see image at right). The Scolnick Prize is given out by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. According to McGovern chairman Robert Desimone, from a recent CUMC press release: